Brian is Co-Founder and VP of engineering for Mass Relevance. A 13-year veteran of Austin high-tech startups, Brian has taken over a dozen commercial applications from napkin sketch to production. He started programming at age 8, when he typed a game (in BASIC) from a book into his TRS-80 Color Computer II.
Brian holds a BS in Computer Science from UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Originally on UIUC’s NCSA Mosaic team (though he never knew him, Brian actually inherited Marc Andreesen’s desk), he quickly moved into web development and Java, and his development skills took him to Austin, TX. There, he wrote and shipped multiple products for Trilogy, a dotcom boom-era software powerhouse.
Later, Brian led development projects and teams at allmystuff, Optive Research (bootstrapped and acquired), and then went to FiveRuns, where he made his transition from Java to Ruby and Rails. In 2009, Brian went from FiveRuns to PeopleAdmin, where he moved a self-hosted nine-year-old Java SaaS application to Ruby, Rails, and the cloud. Follow him at @bdainton.